Nixon By Nixon on HBO

This is a must-see for political junkies. These tapes show Nixon. to be totally insane, yet also brilliant with his moves regarding China, starting the EPA, cancer initiatives, etc.

The video of him done about 10 years after resignation is also disturbing.

Very much worth watching. All that intelligence, undone by raving paranoia.

DT and TB:

I was watching C-SPAN yesterday when they took a call from a guy who said he was 64 and complained that it was only now that he was learning about what went on by the Nixon administration during Watergate and he was blaming the press. I was so hoping that the hosts would have asked him if he had been living under a rock for the past several decades.

My wife worked for Nixon, Mitchell, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander.

Then the firm changed name to Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander.

She knew both Nixon and his secretary Rosemary woods.

Then she moved to Sidley! Austin in NY. The Obama's worked in their Chicago office.

I haven't seen this yet, but did you see "Our Nixon" earlier this year that aired on CNN? It was basically homemovies taken by Nixon's staff, primiarly Haldeman and I want to say Chapin. Apparently Haldeman was very interested in photography and shooting film with his handheld.

Too bad Haldeman wasn't more of an audio buff to help with that 18 1/2 minute gap...

Yes, saw Haldemans home movies. Excellent.

When I worked at Bell Laboratories, we were asked to process that famous tape to see if we could recover the 8 1/2-minute gap. We couldn't.

But that wasn't our only brush with celebrity in the Seventies:

One of our research directors built a digital synthesizer that he said he could use to model the behavior of telephone switching machines in the future. He needed someone who had an "intuitive feel" for that application. He invited none other than Stevie Wonder, who, because he was blind, had that "intuitive feel." The building where he did the experiment practically capsized with people hoping to get a glance of Stevie.

Later, he invited Roger Powell, keyboardist for Todd Rundgren's Utopia, to work with the synthesizer. We got treated to a lot of fine music (and even more weird, nonlinear sounds).

Yes, folks, that's what your telephone bills paid for in those days...

Researchers believe that the necessary technology to unlock the suspiciously erased gap in the tapes will arrive in the future. I don't know the timetable.